


I Know You've Seen Her

by orphan_account



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:45:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five people who mistook Sansa for Catelyn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know You've Seen Her

## petyr

The dragon is the strongest piece in _cyvasse_ , and one, by nature, he is reluctant to use. He takes it in hand now, though, and contemplates playing it.

Petyr does not particularly care for whiling away the afternoon with a game of _cyvasse_. There are other games—games better played in godswoods by rivers, where the air is close and warm—that he would prefer but _cyvasse_ , he has found, is not without its merits.

She is intelligent, his Cat; clever and quick, but there is still so much more he must teach her, and so they play _cyvasse_.

It is just the two of them. There is no one who will interrupt; it feels as if there is no world beyond the walls of his solar. It feels as though the day might never end.

Of course the day will, inevitably, end. He has not failed to notice the changing shadows as the light that filters through the window shifts. It dances on Cat's vibrant hair. It is not sunlight that makes her hair so beautiful; it is her hair that makes the sunlight radiant.

That had made her smile. He likes making her smile. He likes making her laugh, too, though (or, because, perhaps) it is harder; it is always a struggle to be clever in Cat's presence.

It is a careless combination of the desire to please her, he will think later, the lazy manner in which the afternoon slouches by, the Arbor gold in his mouth and that dragon that has the story spilling past his lips. It is about a boy and the lady he loves.

"That cannot be right," she interrupts suddenly. "If she loved him, would not she have given her favor to him, rather than the brute to whom she was promised? That is how it would be in a…" her voice thins; "song…."

His eyes flicker towards her. Suddenly Petyr is irritated. With her. With himself, for forgetting—

 _There is too much Stark in her_ , he thinks; _it truly is like frostbite.—ugly and irreparable, if left alone too long_. Hopefully it was not too late to rid her of it. He had been unable to save Cat. He did not wish to fail her daughter too.

"Life is not a song," he reminds her.

Cat had known that, when she had refused him her favor. Stark had left him a scar, so he would not forget that (as though he ever could). That had been the day Petyr had learned:

"And you needn't play the game by their rules."

He smiled and moved a mountain.

## jon

There is a waterfall that kisses his throat when she leans across him to inspect his wound. It is hair, thick and red and kissed by fire and so, he thinks at first, _Ygritte_. There is something not quite right in that though. It had been Ygritte's smile that made her beautiful but this woman is ethereal and she rarely smiles. There is worry, and at times fear, in her visage. That is his fault, somehow, and he is sorry; he would lift a hand and smooth the creases from her brow but he is floating in space, unsure where his body is.

Perhaps he had wanted her to be his own mother. But she is Robb's, he realizes later, though Lady Catelyn had never seen to his scrapes or visited his bedside when he was ill. He does not question why she does so now. He is only grateful. His chief conern is that she understand that—he needs her to know. (Dimly he is aware there are many other concerns, rather pressing concerns, he should have had but somehow somewhere he has misplaced them.)

Intermittently he is beast and man (and sometimes both, sometimes neither) but he is always voiceless. He pushes his head into her lap, curls his tongue at her wrist. Her giggle is birdsong. (Lady Catelyn had never had laughter, not for a bastard, and perhaps that is why it sounds strange.)

She smells sharp, bitter—no, _tart_.

Jon wakes alone, mind muddled. It is night. There is a single candle burning low. That damned bird is quorking.

There had been no Lady Catelyn, He sees clearly now that there could not have been. She had died with his brother. Even if she hadn't, she would never, not for him—

Kill the boy, he had to kill the boy, but he hadn't; he had wanted, so badly, to be loved, and had dreamt up—

He has only just managed to sit up when the door is opened, and she is here after all. She all but throws herself at him—but gingerly, mindful of his injury.

It is lemons she smells of and as he lifts an arm to return her embrace he is not wondering how she came to be at the Wall or how she has fared all this time. He is only aware that he is so very ashamed at how badly he had wanted Sansa to be Lady Catelyn.

## tyrion

Winterfell is a ruin. How much history had Bolton's Bastard destroyed? A man like that, Tyrion thinks, deserves to be dragon food. Then again, from the stories he had heard, perhaps even a dragon could not stomach him. Perhaps, then, a crossbow—well, it was too late; the man was dead.

Daenaerys had traveled to Winterfell to find the gates thrown open, some dead Boltons and some dead Starks who, as it turned out, were very much alive.

They had been greeted by the little Lord Rickon and Lady Catelyn. Allegedly two wolf pelts had been obtained from that gruesome wedding, but it was not as though she was the first Tully to escape Lannister hands. (Or hand, in the case of his golden brother.)

It had taken much effort to convince the queen not to take Winterfell from the Starks, as she seemed so keen to do. (The Usurper's dogs, she still calls them—he is painfully aware that he is one of them, courtesy of his father—, and when she does he finds himself thinking of Jon Snow and that silent direwolf of his.) Jorah was a northerner himself and had attested, if not too happily, to just how much the northerners loved their Starks. With them at her side, Stannis' defeat would be that much easier.

Eventually the mother of dragons had agreed, piled on the furs, and now she and Lady Stark are waging a war of words in the latter's solar. The queen wants fealty,

Tyrion still finds it hard to believe this is Sansa and not her mother. There is nothing in her of the girl he had wed. She had been a child, sweet—and frightened. Now she did not look as though she had ever been any of those things. She seemed more like the lady who might have had his life if not for Robert Arryn and his sky cells.

Some part of him wanted to congratulate her for that. Another part of him was saddened that the world had taken so much of her innocence.

## roslin

As she always does on waking, Roslin makes her way to the nursery. Her youngest, a sweet girl of two years, will still be sleeping. Roslin has always liked to begin and end the day by looking in on her.

She must still be half asleep, as she thinks nothing of the open door which she always closes to prevent a draft. However there is no missing the figure occupying the room. Auburn hair tumbles down her back and even before she turns Roslin already knows she will know this woman's face. It is a face she sees often, on the nights she tosses and turns restlessly. She knows it as well as her own, though she had seen it only for a few moments, and through her tears at that.

Lady Catelyn turns to face her, Roslin's daughter in her arms.

Her guilt, for her part in the wrongs done to Lady Catelyn vanishes. Roslin is seized with terror.

They say the dead walk, in the north. That they remember those they feared and those they hated in life. None of it had sounded real. After all, they also said the king in the north had changed into a wolf and she knew the truth of that. But this woman has those same cruel shining blue eyes as the creatures from the tales. 

Lady Catelyn had cut Jinglebell's throat with a dinner knife for her son. Roslin thinks she could tear out those eyes with her fingernails, it that was what it took to protect her daughter. She's half-prepared to do it, hands curling, when there is a soft touch to the small of her back. "My niece, Sansa," says Edmure softly.

The distance between Roslin and her daughter had seemed leagues. Sansa crosses it in short time.

There is no hatred in her eyes. There is no disdain. There is nothing, Roslin thinks.

"She is lovely," Sansa says flatly.

Roslin takes her daughter wordlessly.

Sansa Stark looks a Tully, more so than Roslin's own children, but she is so northern and so terribly cold. Roslin cannot help but wonder what role her actions—or perhaps her inactions—had in that.

## benjen

Everything is wrong. The castle is changed. It is Winterfell, and it is not. He can feel the heat of the hot springs, coursing through walls that are not the right colour nor texture. He can see his Winterfell in his periphery, never quite in sight. It makes him feel dizzy, turning his gaze hither and thither to find the castle he knows.

There is a boy, with red hair and blue eyes, who sits before him and calls himself lord. Benjen does not know this boy, and this boy does not seem to know him. But he knows the woman who stands at his side.

Brandon had ridden south to retrieve one sister and Ned had returned home with another. She is the latter.

Perhaps because Ned had not been raised to be Winterfell's lord, he had not known how to be both lord and brother; could be only lord first, brother last. But Catelyn had long been the Lady of Riverrun and was soon a sister in more than just name. That had been before his vows; now he has only brothers. (Brothers he does not know and brothers who are wildlings and women; hopefully one day the notion will amuse him because it has been so long since last he laughed but if all his brothers, the ones he knows, are truly dead, with whom can he laugh?)

It has been many years and she is not his sister; he should greet her _Lady Catelyn_ , but—if the castle has changed she has not. Or, rather, in a way she has. She does not look as she had when last he had seen her. She looks as she had the first time he had seen her, when she had been his sister. So Benjen says:

"Cat."

Something flits across her face. Perhaps he should have called her Lady Catelyn after all, or at least Lady Cat. But he continues, "Is Ned…" His eyes return to the boy, Winterfell's lord, and he cannot, after all, continue, cannot ask if Ned, too, has left before his time, cannot move _dead_ past his lips.

She approaches him cautiously, as though he were still the wounded boy who had just lost so much of family. He wonders if he isn't.

"Sansa."

Benjen stares, uncomprehending.

"I am Sansa, Uncle Ben. My lady mother is dead."

"Butchered," growls the boy, tapping his leg restlessly.

"My brother." Her expression seems to soften. "Lord Rickon."

No. Catelyn, this is Cat, he is sure of it. Her face, her hair, even her voice—the same. Surely she cannot be Sansa; it could not be Ned's youngest who lorded. What jape were the gods playing—and why?

"Butchered," she echoes, "But winter is coming."

Cat had once confessed she found the Stark words ominous, almost frightening. He had not understood. They were a warning, he had assured her, A reminder. He understands now.

In Sansa's voice—so like Cat's—the words are a promise—a threat. They are not directed at him, but still he shivers.


End file.
